The title "Carrying Fire" is taken from Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men,in which Sheriff Ed Tom Bell talks about his own father. “I had two dreams about him after he died. I don’t remember the first one all that well. But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothing. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen that he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there.”

Sunday, February 1, 2015

My Parent's Marriage and WWII

Just engaged

My father and mother first met in Los
Angeles in the fall of 1940. Twenty three-year old Donald R.
Christensen had recently returned from a Mormon mission to Denmark
where he had been evacuated by ship just as Germany invaded that
country in 1940. Back in California he began living with his brother
Earl’s family in Glendale and working at a defense plant for
Lockheed Aircraft in nearby Burbank. Nineteen-year-old Jocile
Ursenbach had been home from France and Belgium for about two years
where her parents had presided over the Mormon mission there. In
1940 she was living with her parents in Los Angeles and working in a
woman’s clothing store. Their two large families had each arrived
in the Los Angeles area in the mid-1920s. The Ursenbach’s had come
from Utah, Idaho, and most recently Alberta, Canada, where Jocile was
born in 1921, the youngest of eleven children. The Christensen’s
had come from Colorado by way of Utah. Don was born in Salt Lake
City on September 3, 1917, the youngest of thirteen children and the
only one not born in Manassa, Colorado.

Both families were part of what some
have dubbed a “Mormon Diaspora,” a fairly large scale migration
of second and third generation Mormons from the mountain west to
Southern California beginning in the 1920s and ‘30s. By the 1940s
the Mormon “colony” in the Los Angeles area was growing rapidly,
but was still close-knit enough for widespread and common
acquaintances, especially among young people. Both Don and Jocile
being from large, prominent families from within that community, and
both being active in Church functions, it was almost inevitable that
they would meet.

Jocile describes their first meeting:
“My parents and I came home from Belgium in 1938; a year after Don
went to Denmark. I was singing in the South Los Angeles Stake Chorus
with Zelma and Melba [Don’s sisters] who kept telling me they
wanted me to meet their brother when he came home from his mission.
In the fall of 1940 there was a party and Lyle Fackerell asked if he
could bring a friend of his as a blind date for me. This friend, who
had just come home from a mission, was Don. It was a terrible
evening. We were not at all impressed with each other. I thought
Don was the most conceited, egotistical bore I had ever met. He
wasn’t all that enthused about me either. He was full of talk
about his experience of being evacuated out of Denmark during the war
and coming across the ocean on a tramp steamer. He had a lot of
pictures. I picked one of them up and he said, ‘Please don’t get
your fingerprints on my pictures.’ I dropped it and informed him
that I had more pictures of Europe than he did. So the evening
ended. At that time he was living in Glendale and we didn’t see
each other for almost a year.”

The next summer they met again and
began their whirlwind courtship. Jocile continues, “In July 1941
there was a dance and I went with some friends and Don was there
without a date. He asked me to dance and we ended up dancing
together most of the evening. Then he asked if he could take me
home. We found we had both mellowed and changed. After a long
courtship—I think it was three dates—we became engaged. Don
moved back to Huntington Park so we could see more of each other.”

They were married on October 27, 1941.
Life seemed full of promise during those halcyon days in Southern
California. The Depression was ending and jobs were plentiful,
particularly in the burgeoning defense industry. There was talk,
concern and anxiety about war in Europe and Asia and whether United
states would get involved. Some of their friends were already in
active military service, but war still seemed remote for the
newlyweds. Don and Jocile settled into a little apartment in
Huntington Park near family and friends, and he continued to make the
long drive to work at the Lockheed plant in Burbank. They had been
married only five weeks—were virtually still on a honeymoon—when
news came of the attack on Pearl Harbor. On Sunday, December 7th,
they were attending church as Jocile recalls, “It was announced
that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and all servicemen were to
return to their bases. This was a shock. Many of us didn’t even
know where Pearl Harbor was. We soon learned.”

Baby On Board

Suddenly, the future which had seemed
so bright and full of promise was filled with uncertainty. Young
men, including many of their friends, rushed to enlist in the
military, while others were drafted. With rumor and fear that the
Japanese might attack California, Japanese-American citizens, some of
whom were their acquaintances, were rounded up and moved to
interment camps far-removed from the coast. Food and gasoline
rationing went into effect, as well as mandatory nighttime blackouts.

Within a few months Don began talking
about leaving his defense job at Lockheed and joining the Los Angeles
police department. He knew that the Lockheed job was not permanent,
and he wanted a better career opportunity. Besides, the long daily
drive from Huntington Park to Burbank and back was a wearisome chore.
His oldest brother Leonard Christensen was then Commander of West
Los Angeles Detective Division of the LAPD, and assured him
acceptance on the force. Jocile, however, was strongly opposed. She
felt police work was too dangerous, and knew he might lose his draft
deferment if he left Lockheed. “I had visions of him getting shot
or something. Then one day he came home from work hurt. Someone had
thrown a hot rivet and it had gone wild and hit Don on the side of
his head. It barely missed his eye and grazed clear back on the side
of his head. I decided he would be just as safe as a policeman.”

As soon as Don was accepted to the
Police Academy he quit his job at Lockheed, lost his draft deferment
and was classified 1A. Even though police work was considered an
essential wartime occupation, that draft exemption did not apply to
trainees. He needed six weeks at the police academy and six months
probationary duty to assure him a place on the force after his
military service. He was granted a draft induction delay to fulfill
these requirements, and at the same time he applied for and was
accepted by the Army Air Force. Jocile writes, “He had to go to
the Police Academy for six weeks. I went to stay with my folks as
our first child was due. At the end of his third week of training we
had to call him home to take me to the hospital. After a long labor
Donald Mark was born September 18, 1942.”

Born nine months after Pearl Harbor, I
have always felt that World War II and I began together, and that my
story and my identity are integrally bound up with that time, that
conflict, and the music of that era. Tunes like "Moonlight Serenade" or "We'll Meet Again," or a movie like "12 O'Clock High" can still put a lump in my throat. After more than 70 years I
remain haunted by WWII, my memories, and the loss of my father in that war.

Lt. Donald R. Christensen

About Me

"This is a tribute to my father's life and his war. His name was Lt. Donald R. Christensen and he was a B-17 pilot with the 8th Air Force in England during World War II. He was stationed with the 398th Bomb Group at Nuthampstead. England, and was a member of the 603rd Squadron. He and all but one of his crew men were killed on March 2, 1945, when the tail was shot off of his aircraft by enemy fighters the plane crashed near Slany, Czechoslovkia (today's Czech Republic.) Tail gunner Selmer Haakenson was the sole survivor. I was two and a half years old.

I have been haunted by the loss of my father all my life, and after 70 years I still grieve. For the last 25 years or more I have been sporadically combing through old papers and photographs, military records, books relating to the 8th Air Force, and talking with many veterans of the 398th BG. I have been wanting to tell his story for a long time, and the 70th anniversary of his death seems like an appropriate time to get off my duff and honor his memory in words and pictures."

My Mission

I am a World War II researcher and my mission has been mainly to find out about my father. His name was Lt. Donald R. Christensen and he was a B-17 pilot with the 8th Air Force in England during World War II. He was stationed with the 398th Bomb Group at Nuthampstead. England, and was a member of the 603rd Squadron. He and all but one of his crew men were killed on March 2, 1945, when the tail was shot off of his aircraft by enemy fighters the plane crashed near Slany, Czechoslovkia

I have been been on this quest most of my life, but more seriously in the last 25 years or so. Now I'm ready to write about it.

Thank you for visiting my page and taking the time to read this material. I welcome all comments.

To see a slideshow that I made honoring the 70th anniversary of my father's fatal plane crash, see here.